I love gimmicks. And in this blog you’ll see plenty of them – regular outlandish predictions, and deciding who to applaud and who’s just a fraud, to name two.
While I love gimmicks, there’s one I just don’t get – power rankings. Everybody’s doing them online these days, from ESPN to SI to Fox to my old compadres at Pro Football Weekly. But I don’t care. I guess I see why a media outlet would do these. Someone gets mad that his favorite team is ranked 14th instead of 12th, and so he fires off a combative email or leaves a comment, and that creates traffic, and that makes the bosses and the advertisers happy.
Here’s the problem – the whole exercise doesn’t really tell you anything. So one night when I couldn’t sleep (too much Coke Zero), I turned my overactive brain to trying to come up with a way to take the emphasis off the rankings part of the equation and put it back on what’s important – the power part. After all, chances are that the 12th and the 14th teams are roughly the same. But how are they relative to other teams? What tier of teams are they on? How far are they behind the other teams? In other words, how powerful are they – really?
That’s the reason behind the biggest gimmick of this blog, which is what I’m calling the theory of relativity. The goal is to evaluate teams, players, themes, storylines, whatever relative to each other.
Football relativity may not be worth the internet it’s printed on, and the concept will probably morph over time, but hopefully it will be fun.
And my sincerest apologies to Mr. Einstein – or is it Dr.? did he get a Ph. D? I know I’m not doing you justice. Maybe I’ll grow out my mustache to make up for it or something.
Football Relativity 